Coach runs over dreams

Three students drowning in a flooded basement of their coaching centre in west Delhi was a tragedy waiting to happen. It shone the spotlight on multiple mismanaged areas and unscrupulous practices – poor city drainage system, poor-quality design and construction of Indian buildings, unauthorised and overcrowded coaching centres that have mushroomed all over the country.A political blame game has started on why city streets get flooded and who allowed illegal coaching centres to function. This column aims to deal with the latter issue. The coaching industry has had explosive growth. An Indian student today cannot survive until they join a coaching centre.There are coaching centres to get better marks in school, to clear entrance exams for college, to clear job exams and to virtually achieve anything worthwhile academically. There are even coaching centres to join other (more prestigious) coaching centres.Milking desperation | Childhood is no longer about playing in the park in the evening. Indian childhoods are now spent in basement dungeons of coaching centres, preparing to clear some 1% selection rate exam. And if you get rejected (which 99% of the people will), you are left to fend for yourself. If you have rich parents, fine. If not, well, God help you.India’s coaching classes have spotted a massive opportunity in a sizeable demographic – the desperate Indian student. It is a fantastic market. There are millions of desperate students each year. Just the exam to become a doctor (NEET) had more than 23mn test takers this year. Multiply that across various other professions and colleges, and you are talking crores of desperate souls.If you can offer these desperate souls a chance to crack that great exam, you are like God to them. What’s some lakhs of money then that the centres charge?Roaring business | From a pure business investor point of view, few industries offer what coaching classes do – an endless sea of desperate customers. No surprise that in recent years, venture capital and private equity firms have poured hundreds of millions, if not billions, into the Indian coaching centre business.The problem isn’t coaching classes making money. Every business does. Problems arise when the inherent desperation of the customer leads to all kinds of exploitative, unscrupulous and highly unethical practices.Unscrupulous practices | The first unethical practice is an open industry secret. That the coaching classes mostly know which prospective new students will never clear a particular entrance exam. Yet, they enrol the child – only because the student is ready to pay. For a while you offer the student hope, only for it to be crushed when he or she doesn’t make it.The second unscrupulous practice is cutting corners, such as squishing in as many students as you can in a class or renting the cheapest facility to teach students. There is zero incremental cost of stuffing another body in the classroom or basement. There is 100% more from the new student, by way of fees.There are no guidelines on how a classroom of a coaching centre should be structured. With investor money backing some of the big institutions, there’s pressure to grow – at any cost. And that means pressure to enrol students, good and bad. Maybe this is why China has banned all edtech companies from raising investor money and sought to restructure the sector as a non-profit. Crying for reform | Reform is long overdue in the Indian coaching industry. The recent incident only sheds light on the terrible conditions students face. The biggest reform must come in the testing system itself. To have an exam where half a percent of people are selected, and students try to game it for two years in a coaching centre dungeon makes no sense.What are we really screening for? Even with no leaks our entrance exam system needs reform. A more rationalised, less-gameable testing system will automatically stifle the coaching industry and take away its oxygen.An even bigger reform would be to open up our economy further, so there are a lot more good jobs than we have at the moment. The craze for govt jobs is partly due to the paucity of good private sector jobs – mainly because the economy hasn’t been liberalised enough to create massive growth.Code of conduct | Even as all these big reforms take time, we need urgent regulations for the coaching sector. Knee-jerk, draconian measures like sealing of centres won’t help. Rather, we need a code of conduct document for coaching centres, where there are mechanisms in place to avoid exploitation of students and unethical practices.It is indeed sad that we rob Indian childhoods, make the Indian student go through a rough grind and have created an industry that essentially thrives on monetising the desperate Indian student. Let the recent events be a trigger for reforms, so we can pass the ultimate test for any society: to bring up our children well.